Can I say Kant is a Metaphysical Agnostic bec he thought the true nature of things that exist are unknowable?

Question by heeltap: Can I say Kant is a Metaphysical Agnostic bec he thought the true nature of things that exist are unknowable?
Kant thought we humans knew appearances but not the essences(true natures) behind those appearances.

This is a Q in Metaphysics aka Theories of Reality. Please, I prefer A’s in your own words.

Best answer:

Answer by MephistophelesNo…but you could say that he was a skeptic. A skeptic being someone who doubts that we can ever gain true knowledge. In the example you cite Kant did not believe that the apperances which disclosed themselves, via the senses, to people could be said to be accurate because he believed that any data recieved through our senses was translated into something we could understand. Of course whilst his arguments may be plausible it is always possible that how things appear, even after processing by the brain, is exactly the way things are.

That’s the whole upshot of empirical reality. He’s a realist when it comes to “appearances”. The things that appear before our mind, hooked up in the right cognitive way, are what IS real.

The things-in-themselves are not.

Things unconditioned by time, space, causality, etc don’t resemble what we see and know– they don’t even make sense except abstractly, as the category of things we cannot expereience in transcendental ideality.

Tables and chairs etc exist. And not just in the mind. We point to them out there. All of that is real. What isn’t is to construe–as the empiricists Kant is critical of — reality transcendentally. To do such leads to the irrefutable truth of skepticism, since you’ve just defined reality as outside of us.

I think agnostic is true about thing-in-themselves but his claim is much stronger. He does not confer reality to them.